Bowie appears on Saturday Night Live flanked by two aliens [below]. They send waves to the chip implanted under my scalp. That was last night, today we’re in a Chinese-American restaurant that has the shady comfort of a dive bar, and a lot of Beach Boys songs on the jukebox. “Wild Honey” was on a moment ago, and is stuck in my head now. Likewise, one of the monologues from the play Kennedy’s Children has resurfaced from the Stockton Community Theater production that ran last April: my first set design, in what I think will be a career path. This is my brain on a Sunday: rummaging through nostalgia’s yard sale, staring without thought at the same items over and over, with no intentions of buying.

In 1973 Robert Patrick’s play Kennedy’s Children opened obscurely in a London pub. By 1975 it was on Broadway, and now (in 1979) CBS-Cable TV is airing their production of it, directed by Marshall W. Mason. There’s a lingering black screen between the introduction and the start of the play on this YouTube video, but it is in its entirety with quite a cast: Shirley Knight, Jane Alexander, Lindsay Crouse, Brad Dourif, Charles Harper, Steven Davis, Kenny Burgess, John P. Dodd, and the director himself playing a character who is described in the credits as “mute” and who speaks a combination of ASL (American Sign Language) and pantomime.

This is also the year I start studying ASL in a night class at the local community college, encouraged by the fact that a couple of the campers at the summer camp where I work are deaf. Do me a favor; go to this ASL website, and under “Main Dictionary” look up the words “wild” and “honey.”

The still images here are black-and-white photos of work by Barbara Ward Armstrong, who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty-nine years ago, and who will die in Boston, thirty-three years from now.